Two Years of Design, No Reward: Animal Crossing DLC Player Completes Every Vacation Home to Nintendo’s Silence

A dedicated player of Animal Crossing: New Horizons has brought a surprising and somewhat disheartening detail to light regarding the Happy Home Paradise (HHP) DLC. After a monumental two-year effort spent meticulously designing a vacation home for every single villager in the game—a task estimated to involve over 350 individual homes—the player discovered that their exhaustive labor was met with an anticlimactic silence from Nintendo. This lack of any formal in-game acknowledgement has sparked a discussion among the community about the value of ultimate completion in modern video game design and the nature of player engagement for high-value DLC.

The Monumental Task of DLC Completion

The Happy Home Paradise expansion, released in November 2021, is fundamentally an entire decorating game layered onto Animal Crossing: New Horizons. It tasks players with becoming a Paradise Planning designer, creating bespoke vacation retreats based on the unique visions and requests of the franchise’s hundreds of animal residents. The DLC is highly praised for adding depth, creative tools, and a near-endless well of content, making it a cornerstone of the Nintendo Switch Online + Expansion Pack offering.

• Designing a vacation home for every animal in the current roster requires an immense time commitment, with the player, Reddit user Beautiful-Support-56, noting it took approximately two years to complete the entire roster.
• While the DLC provides continuous rewards up to a certain point—like unlocking Wardell’s catalog (which is a high-CPC keyword item for ACNH players) for purchasing all regular furniture, and the ability to remodel homes on the player’s own island—these features are unlocked relatively early, around the 30-home mark.
• Once all animals have been served, the player is simply left alone on the archipelago’s beach, with no new clients and zero in-game celebration for completing the full roster of homes.

The Joke That Could Have Been a Reward

The player’s observation, shared widely on Reddit, highlights the disappointment in the comparison to another major Nintendo title, The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild (BotW). In BotW, players who undertake the similarly monumental task of finding all 900 Korok Seeds are rewarded with Hestu’s Gift, a non-functional item widely known among the gaming community as a “golden turd.”

The humorous nature of the BotW reward is itself an acknowledgement—a nod from the developers to the player’s extreme dedication, transforming a meaningless item into a coveted symbol of completionist pride. The ACNH player noted the contrast, lamenting, “I’m almost disappointed that there is absolutely no acknowledgment, like congratulations you’ve designed all the homes woooh… In Breath of the Wild they give you a little golden turd for finding all 900 Koroks.”

The Value of Completionism in ‘Live Service’ Games

This incident raises a pertinent question for the gaming industry about setting achievable and rewarding ultimate goals, especially in games with “endless” content loops like ACNH. While the Poki currency and catalog access are valuable, the pursuit of 100% completion often transcends utility—it’s about receiving a token, a badge of honor, or a humorous acknowledgment from the developers themselves.

The lack of a simple cutscene, a custom congratulatory item, or even a new title for the player’s passport for completing all 350+ homes is seen by many as a missed opportunity for Nintendo to celebrate its most loyal and engaged customers. In a world of continuous updates and expansion pass content, acknowledging such long-term, high-effort achievements is a powerful tool for maintaining customer loyalty and generating positive gaming news coverage.

The current lack of a final, ceremonial reward may simply suggest that Nintendo never truly anticipated players would complete the entire catalog, given the continuous trickle of new villagers added through updates. Nevertheless, the player’s dedication serves as a testament to the game’s addictive design, even if the destination was less rewarding than the two-year journey.

Keywords: Animal Crossing: New Horizons, Happy Home Paradise, HHP DLC, Nintendo Switch, The Mortuary Assistant, Breath of the Wild, Golden Turd, Korok Seeds, Poki, Wardell’s Catalog, video game design, player engagement, gaming news, high-value DLC, completionist. SEO-Optimized Content.